The ACGME’s DEI Awards Program

Last month, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) received top billing in an executive order from President Trump targeting accreditors for injecting DEI and racial discrimination into higher education. 

Per the order, the ACGME’s offensive behavior includes expecting “institutions to focus on implementing ‘policies and procedures related to recruitment and retention of individuals underrepresented in medicine,’ including ‘racial and ethnic minority individuals.’

But in addition to its diversity-promoting accreditation standards, the ACGME goes a step further and helps financially incentivize additional DEI activities at medical schools through the Catalyst Awards, a grant program that provides up to $100,000 to selected projects.

The Catalyst Awards, run in collaboration with the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, awards grants to projects that “impact the clinical learning environment and improve the experience of residents and fellows” in one of three priority areas, including “Promoting diversity, equity, and belonging.” The program will begin accepting applications next month.

Previous recipients of the award include the Northwell Health Feinstein Institute for Medical Research for its project to develop skills “necessary for managing workplace microaggressions,” as well as Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for its “multidisciplinary health equity workshop” that instructs residents to “be cognizant of individual biases (their own and those of others), understand the issue of structural injustice, and address the impacts of bias and injustice on their patients and peers.”

What’s more, in addition to the ACGME’s DEI-infused accreditation requirements for residency programs, the organization also recently released the latest version of its Clinical Learning Environment Review (CLER) Program.

This program is “designed to improve how clinical sites engage resident and fellow physicians in learning to provide safe, high quality patient care.” These expectations are not accreditation requirements for participating residency programs, but are described as “feedback” for residency programs and other clinical settings.

However, the latest version of the program, released in 2024, introduced a new “CLER Focus Area” called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Unsurprisingly, that focus area stresses the importance of “strategies and efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and improve interprofessional learning” in clinical practice.

The DEI focus area includes several DEI “pathways” that are essentially just expectations for residency programs to promote DEI.

For instance, one of the “pathways” states that the “Clinical learning environment creates and maintains diversity among the clinical care team to optimize learning and patient care.” To achieve this goal, the clinical learning environment “creates a systematic and comprehensive approach to recruit and retain a diverse clinical care team.”

All told, the CLER program description mentions “equity” 31 times.

These initiatives are further evidence that the ACGME has a deep, institutional belief in DEI, and its accreditation requirements are just the tip of the iceberg. 

This is an activist organization with an ideological commitment to advancing the DEI agenda.